Fictocritical Empathy and the Work of Mourning

Main Article Content

Heather Kerr

Abstract

What is at stake in this fictocritical aesthetic remediation? What existing practices would it re-function, supplement or supersede? Is mourning adequate to the task of cross-cultural reconciliation? How might fictocritical effects be animated in the service of this aim? In the process of exploring these questions I will suggest that the methodology of mourning is an allegorical vehicle for cross-cultural writing. Employed to remediate the colonial inheritance, it nonetheless requires acts of empathy according to models of the imagination that are part and parcel of that inheritance.

Article Details

Section
New Writing (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Heather Kerr, University of Adelaide

HEATHER KERR is senior lecturer in English at the University of Adelaide. She publishes in the areas of early modern culture, postcolonial and contemporary cultural studies.